`A Real Place Where Something Unreal Had Happened'

As conspicuous as a vein of coal, the slender black volume stood among the pale history books on a shelf in the library. It was On European Ground, a collection of black and white photographs by Alan Cohen, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His title is literal. Cohen’s pictures contain no people or animals, no trees, buildings or skies. He photographs the ground of World War I battlefields, Nazi death camps and the Berlin Wall: dirt, stones, concrete, bricks, occasionally grass or a manhole cover. At work, he must look like a man praying or looking for something he lost.

His pictures are recognizable yet resemble abstractions. At Dachau he photographed the slabs of stone, the size and shape of railroad ties, that outline the foundations of the barracks where inmates were housed. The Nazis razed the buildings as American troops approached in April 1945, in a frantic effort to erase evidence of their crimes. I visited Dachau in July 1973, and remember those stones. The crematoria remained, with their sliding trays used to push bodies into the ovens, but the barracks and other buildings were ominous in their absence.

I was in Munich less than a year after the Palestinian terrorists had murdered the Israeli athletes, and for the first time I saw soldiers patrolling with machine guns. To visit Dachau, we waited on a Munich street corner for a tourist bus to drive us 10 miles to the camp. Seated in front of us were two histrionically boisterous teachers from Chicago who announced their gayness, their Jewishness, and their intention not to be sentimental or reverent. They had brought a Frisbee to throw at the camp. Years later, re-reading Beckett’s Malone Dies, I came across a passage that unexpectedly reminded me of them:

“A great calm stole over him. Great calm is an exaggeration. He felt better. The end of life is always vivifying.”

These guys were so vivified, some of the other visitors wanted to kill them, and I have remained offended by their behavior. The camps are sacred places – sacred to the memory of the victims – and to prance about like spoiled children was not “transgressive,” to use a cant term for violating decency, but immature and deeply disrespectful to other visitors, some of whom were weeping.

The subject of artistic representations of the Holocaust is painful and contentious, and I suggest you read Berel Lang on the subject. Cohen’s aesthetic sense is modest and thoughtful, and he works through absence and indirection. On European Ground includes an interview with Cohen conducted by Roberta Smith, an art critic with the New York Times. About his visit to Dachau, he says:

“Once we were there – this is so difficult to convey because the experience was such a profound one. Until then I had never been in a place that had experienced such unregulated, systematic, and intentional violence, where the earth had absorbed such pain, where there had been such horror loosed, just within the confines of this place, and I was there now. It was amazing to me to be there. And being there made me aware of the vast discontinuity of the site. Within camp walls, more than thirty thousand people had been destroyed, but there was no evidence, nothing, in the present tense, to verify my understandings or feelings. I was in a real place where something unreal had happened and that, to me, was like travel to and being on the moon.”

Cohen visited Dachau in 1992, and two years later he photographed Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück and Buchenwald. One inmate at Buchenwald was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the dissident German pastor who was transferred to Flossenburg and hanged there on April 9, 1945, just weeks before the Allies liberated the camps. Geoffrey Hill wrote “Christmas Trees” about him:

“Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares’ candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,

“restores the broken themes of praise,
Encourages our borrowed days,
By logic of his sacrifice.

“Against wild reasons of the state
His words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.”